The present disclosure relates to an approach to meeting serial read timing as required by standard Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) in an Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM), in which the EEPROM has added security functions. Aspects include a secure SPI EEPROM that is a drop-in replacement for a standard SPI EEPROM in which the SPI master chip is unaware of added security functions and techniques for accelerating a memory read command.